Mackerel Media’s Search and Digital Marketing Roundup – June 2025
There have been several important search and digital marketing updates this June, including changes to Google Search and Google Ads, video updates in AI overviews and new advertising features within WhatsApp. Here’s a closer look at how these changes are affecting the digital space.
Google Gets A Spring Clean
Google has announced that it will soon be dropping support for seven structured data types, including book actions, course information, job-related estimated salaries, learning videos and special announcements. Google is hoping this change will simplify search results and reduce the amount of visual distractions that typically appear within rich results.
While these changes won’t affect rankings, the removal of rich results for these types could impact organic visibility and click-through rates for affected websites. Google notes that this move is to prioritise more essential structured data, and so it would be worthwhile to review your existing structured data and ensure that important elements are included (such as website schema, organisation schema, review schema, FAQ schema, breadcrumb schema, product schema) to ensure your website continues to show enhanced search results.
Offerwall: Watch, Click, and Win!
On the ad front, this month Google launched Offerwall, a new ad content tool that rewards users for engaging with specific ads such as filling in a form, completing a task or watching a video to proceed. This type of ad format gives users in-app rewards when they complete specific actions, with the aim of helping publishers monetise their audience more effectively through direct ad engagement. Unlike traditional display ads, Offerwall allows users to choose how they can unlock content. As a result, impressions are likely to be more deliberate and drive higher interactions and conversions.
From Queries to Quick Clips
Both Google and Bing have added short-form videos into their AI-generated overviews. Google’s AI Overviews and Bing’s Copilot search will start incorporating short videos from YouTube and TikTok, with the goal of providing users with more engaging content. This update shows the importance that video has on both brand marketing and visibility in AI search results, and how short form videos can help improve user engagement alongside traditional on-page content.
YouTube has reported that Shorts now receive over 200 billion daily views. The update was shared by CEO Neal Mohan, who also revealed that over one billion hours of YouTube content are viewed on television screens daily and that TV screens are the primary viewing method for more than half of the top 100 YouTube channels, showing the impact of television compared to mobile-first video marketing. With short-form video continuing to dominate user engagement, it’s important that brands ensure that Shorts are part of their video marketing strategy.
WhatsApp’s Marketing Makeover
WhatsApp has released new discovery tools to their Updates tab, which is used by over 1.5 billion people daily. These new features include promoted channels for users to discover branded content; paid channel subscriptions which allows creators to monetise content; and status ads which appear between updates in WhatsApp’s status section, similar to Instagram stories. These latest updates show that WhatsApp is growing from a messaging tool to a platform that brands and advertisers can engage with users on, and how WhatsApp marketing could be a valuable option for future advertising campaigns.
